


The Consistency of Reality

by MK_Yujji



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-20
Updated: 2014-10-20
Packaged: 2017-11-19 03:10:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/568414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MK_Yujji/pseuds/MK_Yujji
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Alphas judge the Hale pack unworthy to live.  At the end of everything, Stiles only has his belief left.  </p><p>Fortunately, belief is all that he needs to return to the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My first attempt at Teen Wolf fanfic. Though this fic will be Derek/Stiles eventually, that's going to be quite a ways away. For the beginning, consider things to be canon-compliant up to the end of S2. After that, it all gets thrown out the window. Rating is subject to change in later chapters.

~*~*~  
Prologue  
~*~*~

It’s wrong.

Everything is wrong.

As Stiles lies on his side, gasping for air, trying not to see the bloody mess that used to be someone he knows, someone he _loves_ , all he can really think about is how very, very wrong it is.

None of this should have happened.

He and Scott should be enjoying their senior year. Scott and Allison should be disgustingly happy and making googly eyes at each other while he pretends to gag even as he secretly envies them.

Jackson and Lydia should still be the power couple with everything going for them even if they always were too dysfunctional to be particularly healthy.

Erica should be on that crazy no carb diet that Stiles had read about, the one that can reset her brain so that it doesn’t send her into seizures anymore. Boyd should be chilling at the ice rink or whatever it was he did for fun in his pre-wolf days. Isaac’s father should be alive but in jail while he lives with people who actually care about him. 

And Derek… Derek should never have come back to Beacon Hills. He and Laura should have stayed wherever they’d been before. Or better yet, he should never have fallen into Kate Argent’s psychotic clutches. His parents should still be alive, his life still whole. He shouldn’t be the broken shell that he is, desperately seeking to cling to a new pack that’s too messed up to give him back the family that he misses.

None of them should be _here_.

His cough sounds wet as he curls in on himself, his mind drifting away from the pain.

Somewhere behind him, he can hear one of the Alphas prowling around. Its feet squelch slightly as it steps through the blood.

He can hear another faint whimper of sound. It’s full of the same kind of pained loss that Stiles felt when his mother slipped away and no amount of promising to be better brought her back or took the broken look off his father’s face. He knows that kind of sound intimately and he hates it.

He hates knowing that even if the Alpha pack kills Derek, they’ve forced him to live through this again, the death of his pack, the loss of the family that he’s tried so hard to create.

It’s not fair and it’s so heartbreakingly wrong.

The Alpha nudges him over on his back. 

It’s the female. She smirks down at him before speaking to one of the others over her shoulder. “The human is still alive.”

Her eyes flash red as she pokes at his arm with her toe. All he can manage is to blink up at her. There’s a distant ringing in his ears and he’s lost contact with most of his body. He thinks that’s probably a good thing, though. If he could feel it, he suspects there’d be nothing but a lot of pain in his world.

She crouches down and strokes his cheek. “It’s quite astounding that you’re still holding on…”

If he could feel his tongue, he’d have something to say to that. Something about cockroaches or human tenacity or _something_.

As it is he shudders through another shaky breath and tries to tilt his head away from her touch.

She laughs at his effort and taps his nose. “Maybe we’ll turn you. You could be fun.”

“S’wrong,” he manages to force out.

“What’s that?” she asks, leaning closer, a curious expression on her face. 

He has to take another shuddering breath to get the words out again. “S’wrong…. S’all wrong….”

Frowning, she leans in even further, bracing her hands on either side of his head so that she can tip an ear towards him. It’s ridiculous. She’s a _werewolf_ and while he admits that he can barely hear himself inside his own head, there’s no way _she_ can’t hear him. “What’s wrong?”

Warmth settles in his chest, spreading outwards from his heart, through his limbs and he lets his eyes fall closed at the comforting sensation. As it hits the edges of his body, his fingers tingle and Stiles sighs, relaxing back against the floor.

“Kali… what _is_ that?”

The other werewolf is distant. He doesn’t matter. 

None of this matters, because this is wrong. It’s not supposed to be like this. 

“I don’t know,” Kali murmurs, her fingers brushing over Stiles’ forehead. “He’s … doing something, I think.”

Her voice sounds less jeering and more hesitant. 

“Just rip his throat out and be done with it.”

Kali ignores her fellow alpha, though. She shakes Stiles a little. “Human. What’s wrong?”

When his eyes snap open again, she jerks back, but he doesn’t bother worrying about it. She doesn’t matter. She’s part of something that should never have happened.

Something that never _did_.

What’s wrong?

“Everything.” 

Belief settles in his stomach, in his chest, in his head, heavy and real. For a moment, there is nothing but stillness.

Then the warmth explodes away from him and everything vanishes in a blurry haze before Stiles finally lets go.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay. I wanted to see what we were going to learn about Derek's past and the Hale's in general before I continued. Then the train wreck that was 3A/B and Jeff Davies inability to maintain a cohesive timeline happened and... yeah. :-/ I've kept some of the events we were shown and discarded others, but I've resettled everything in a timeline that works for the fic. Some of 3A canon will be kept, 3B is pretty much ignored except Claudia Stilinski's death. The name I've given Stiles is Welsh.

~*~*~  
Chapter 1  
~*~*~

Bright sunshine filtered through the window, falling in a puddle over the bed, right in Stiles’ face. It wasn’t the best way to wake up, blind and apparently later than he’d meant to, but it wasn’t the worst way he’d ever woken, either.

Sighing, Stiles shifted as far over as he could manage before blinking sleepy eyes open and trying to remember why on earth he’d fallen asleep on the wrong end of his bed the night before. The ceiling wasn’t offering any answers.

“Fucking werewolves,” he muttered, knowing it had to be their fault. The next time he saw Derek, he was going to-

Derek.

The alphas.

Memory crashed back over Stiles and he sat up, hands flying over his own torso. Nothing hurt or pulled. There wasn’t any strange numbness or aching.

“It… it worked.” He made a whoop of noise and flailed out of bed, joyous in a way he hadn’t been in years. “Of _course_ it fucking worked. Stiles, my man, you are a motherfucking _Wizard_!”

He tripped over his own feet as he tore out of the room. He needed to see the others. He needed to see with his own eyes that they were alive, that the alphas weren’t a threat any longer. 

Skidding down the stairs, he tripped again and couldn’t help but frown at the mess he didn’t remember leaving at the foot of the stairs.

Maybe whatever it was he’d done had undone his last major clean-up?

A faint whine escaped his throat as he paused to stuff the clothes back into the box he’d knocked over. If he was going to have to clean the whole damned house up again, well… Well, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

Scent memory triggered hard as a familiar perfume wafted up out of the clothes and he shuddered to a stop, eyes clenched as he forced himself to breath slowly. It had been a while since he’d run into anything of his mother’s, longer still since her perfume had been strong enough to send him tumbling back onto the verge of a panic attack. 

It took a few minutes, but he managed to stop the spiral downwards and regained control of himself.

Frowning, Stiles pulled at the top dress, a pretty floral print that he remembered his mom loving. 

His fists clenched in the material and his breathing stuttered again. He knew _exactly_ where this dress was supposed to be because he’d been the one to bury the box in the back of the attic himself. 

A sound drew his attention to the sofa and he couldn’t find it in himself to be surprised at the sight of his dad passed out there, an empty bottle of scotch sitting on the coffee table. If his dad was having a bad enough day to break out his mom’s old things and drench them in what little bit of her perfume they had left, then he was definitely having a bad enough day to drink himself into a stupor.

He sighed and re-packed the box before setting it to the side where it wasn’t right in the main walkway again. He’d take it back up to the attic later.

His dad had been doing so good the last few years, only backsliding on his mom’s birthday and the anniversary of her death.

Stiles paused for a moment as he moved to grab the empty bottle and saw an even bigger mess of them littered under the table. Had he somehow jumped them straight to one of those days? Days got jumbled up in the mess that the supernatural made of his life, but he was pretty sure that the final alpha attack had been months after the anniversary.

He winced. If he’d jumped back that far, did that mean he’d screwed something up? Had he jumped forward instead? Had he been _missing_? What if he hadn't done anything but save himself? What if the others were all still dead?

“Gw… gw’mei.” He startled as a heavy hand dropped onto his shoulder. “Mei…”

Wrinkling his nose, he sighed. His dad had never had an easy time trying to pronounce his birth name - there was a _reason_ , he’d made sure it took actual digging with intent to find the ‘Gwalchmei’ attached to any of his personal files - but the ‘Mei’ shortening had stopped when Stiles had put his foot down and chosen his own nickname. He loved his mother and he respected that part of his heritage, but he’d never understood why his dad would cave to giving his son a name that was so hard for the everyday average joe to pronounce. 

“Jesus, Dad,” Stiles mumbled as he reached up to pat his dad’s hand. “I’m okay.”

Red-rimmed eyes peered at him blearily for a moment before filling with tears. One trembling hand came up to pat him on the cheek before sliding back into his hair. “Look so much like her, Mei…”

Stiles’ breath caught and his heartbeat stuttered about the same time his dad’s fingers got caught in hair that was longer than he’d worn it in years. He’d started buzzing it off as soon as he’d realized that it was _hurting_ his dad, that he and his mother had always gotten the same boyish but feathery haircut for as long as he could remember and he’d asked for it instinctively the first few times they’d gone to the barbershop after she died.

He hadn’t started letting the buzzcut grow out again until he was sure his features had matured enough that the resemblance to his mother wasn’t so startling anymore.

The hand fell away and Stiles leaned forward to press a kiss against his dad’s forehead. His voice trembled. “I know, Dad. I’m sorry.”

He’d forgotten just how much it hurt to be faced with the full brunt of his father’s grief. The man had wallowed in it for over a year after Claudia Stilinski had finally succumbed to her disease. It hadn’t been until tragedy had struck the entire Hale family that he’d finally sobered up and realized that he was destroying the family he still had left.

Stiles stared at his hands blankly. They were too small to be his, attached to arms that were too thin from months of grief and having to fend for himself while his father chose alcohol over food.

Pushing himself up, Stiles staggered away from the couch and headed to the first floor bathroom, not really sure if he believed the clues that were adding up in his head. 

That spark of belief and potential that allowed people to do extraordinary things should not have extended to something as crazy as _time travel_. And even if it did, there was no reason he’d have wanted to set himself down right in the middle of the Stilinski’s own personal tragedy.

The proof was there in the mirror, though. The soft roundness of baby-fat still clinging stubbornly to his ten year old cheeks, the dark circles of too many sleepless nights filled with more panic attacks than he’d ever told his dad about, the wispy hair brushing his cheeks and covering up his ears.

For a minute, he had to force himself to remember how to breath. It was easier than it would have been when he was ten the first time around, thankfully. He’d had a lot of years teaching himself how to work past the blind panic.

Information would help the most, he knew.

He nodded to himself. There was no need to panic. He could go to Deaton and find out just what the hell he’d done. The emissary was cryptic and annoying and far too focused on his own agenda, but if Deaton could just get him pointed in the right direction... 

He'd figure out the rest on his own.

~*~*~

“Deaton!” Stiles struggled with the heavy door of the veterinarian clinic, cursing his scrawny pre-teen arms. If he was right about when this was, it would be another two years before he finally stopped being the smallest kid in his class. His doctor had nearly torn his dad a new one the first time he’d had a physical when they’d finally gotten a handle on being a family again. John Stilinski had stood there and taken it as his due, already more ashamed and guilty than Stiles had been comfortable with.

It wasn’t like Stiles hadn’t figured out how to feed himself, after all, but he’d been grieving too and he hadn’t been hungry most of the time.

When he finally managed to push his way into the clinic, Deaton was standing there watching him with the same look of zen calm that he always wore. Six years didn’t seem to have made much of a difference. “Can I help you?”

“That would be a change, wouldn’t it?” Stiles bit out, unable to help the snide tone. He rolled his eyes at the raised brow that got him and threw his hands out. “So apparently if you believe hard enough you can undo time. Who knew, right?”

Deaton hesitated a moment before stepping closer with a benign smile. “I’m sorry, son. This is an animal clinic. I’m not sure-”

“Yeah, yeah, and you’re ‘just a vet’, right? Oh my god, so that really has been your go-to answer for everything forever. Look, let me break this down for you, okay? You are not just a vet, you are a druid. Talia Hale’s emissary, to be exact. She’s a werewolf. An alpha.” Before Deaton could protest, Stiles waved his hands in the air. He could feel everything pressing in on him and if he didn’t get everything out before anyone stopped him, he really was going to devolve into a full blown panic attack. “Look, bad shit happens, okay? Lots and lots of bad shit on top of lots of other bad shit. Derek gets seduced by a fucking hunter, she kills almost all of the Hale’s, _soon_ , okay? Like, very, very soon. And then Peter kills Laura for the alpha powers in six years, bites my best friend, drags me into this mess, Derek comes back and fails at _life_ because the gods apparently hate him and want him to suffer and there are like kanimas and darachs and hunters and the fucking _alpha_ pack because Deucalion is stupid enough to think he can actually work a peace with Gerard fucking-crazy-pants Argent and it blows up in his face _spectacularly_ so he comes back to fuck everything up and everyone was dead okay? And I just… It was wrong and it shouldn’t have happened so it _didn’t_ , but fuck if I even know how that little bit of belief translates to me being ten years old again because this fucking _sucks_.”

His voice broke on the last word and he looked up to see Deaton still trying to process the rapid-fire word vomit.

“That’s… quite a story,” the druid replied faintly, looking more off-balance than Stiles had ever seen him before. “Perhaps you should sit down and we can go over it again… More slowly and with a bit more coherency.”

Stiles took a deep breath and rubbed his hands over his eyes, not surprised to feel the dampness there. He took another shuddering breath and nodded.

Deaton flipped the closed sign around on the door and led him back to the office. It didn’t look that much different than it did in Stiles’ time.

Once they were all settled, Deaton smiled faintly. “You obviously have me at a disadvantage. You know me, but I do not know you.”

“Stiles. Stiles Stilinksi.” He winced and rubbed a hand through his hair. It felt weird for it to be so long again. Weirder still to realize that no one here knew ‘Stiles’. He hadn’t started using it until Scott failed miserably at pronouncing his real name and he couldn’t bear to hear ‘Mei’ from anyone else. “Gwalchmei Stilinski. My father is the sheriff.”

“Ah.”

Stiles frowned. “What ‘Ah’? Don’t ‘ah’ me. That has nothing to do with this.”

“On the contrary, Mr. Stilinski. It explains a great deal more than you think, but please continue.”

Suspicious as that sounded, Stiles didn’t press the issue. He had enough experience with Deaton to know it was pointless. Deaton would dole out his information whenever he felt like it and not a second before.

~*~*~

“Is it possible?”

“All things are possible.” Alan frowned down at the child who’d passed out on his office sofa. Between the magic drain of whatever he’d done and the emotional and physical toll of his circumstances, he’d barely been conscious as he’d finished his tale. It hadn’t taken much to convince him to curl up and rest. “Some things are simply more probable.”

The werewolf stepped out of the shadows with a matching frown on her face. Her eldest daughter was practically on her heals, fists clenched and fear in her eyes. “His heart was all over the place, but… He believes it. The question is, do you?”

Despite a moment of hesitation, Alan dipped his head in acknowledgment. “I do.”

Talia Hale took a deep breath, trying to steady herself. “Then I’m surprised you let us stay and hear what he had to say. Time travel is dangerous. The temptation to try and change things…”

There was no way she could just sit idly by and let her pack be destroyed, future paradoxes be damned, but she understood the dangers inherently involved. Doing nothing was only an option if she didn’t _know_.

Her emissary quirked a faint smile at her. “Ah, but this is a different matter entirely, isn’t it?”

The werewolves shared a look before Talia arched a brow at Alan. She knew he wouldn’t be hurried, that his fondness for riddles and forcing everyone else to do their own thinking wouldn’t be broken simply because of the severity of the situation. That didn’t mean she didn’t wish he wouldn’t get to the point. “Is it?”

“Do you remember what he said?”

“He said a lot of things, Alan.” 

The rambling monologue had gone off on a dozen different tangents, some more relevant than others, and had taken over an hour before Stilinski had worn himself out. There’d been points when the boy had confused himself almost as much as he’d confused his audience. 

“True,” Alan acknowledged. “He said ‘if you believe hard enough you can undo time’. He didn’t say that he’d gone back to the past or that he’d time travelled. He said, specifically, ‘undo time’.”

“Okay?”

“Claudia Stilinski was a bit fae. She didn’t have much of the power herself, nothing beyond an exceptionally green thumb, but blood was there, nonetheless. When she and her husband first moved to Beacon Hills, she came by to reassure me of her lack of threat.” He nodded towards the sleeping child curled up on his sofa. “It seems to have manifested more solidly in her son.”

“Meaning what exactly?” Laura growled at him, her eyes glowing amber for a moment before Talia rested a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. She understood the frustration, but attempting to rush the emissary through intimidation wouldn’t help.

“Time exists as a steady, straight flow forward,” Alan said, sighing as he held up a finger on each hand about a foot apart. “with fixed points in the stream. Simply going back in time and trying to change one of these fixed points tends to become an exercise in futility. A person may be able to change a few of the details, but those fixed points can never truly be changed. Most often, a time traveler would simply create even worse circumstances around that point. Attempting to change what Mr. Stilinski calls the Hale Fire Tragedy in such a scenario could potentially change the identity of who dies and who ends up comatose but it wouldn't stop the event itself. More likely, it would simply claim more victims. That’s why most people with the ability don’t even bother trying.”

Eyes narrowing, Talia crossed her arms over her chest. “You don’t expect us to do nothing or you wouldn’t have allowed him to continue speaking while we were here.”

“There are stories that I’ve heard,” the emissary said, his voice cautious but hopeful. “Stories of fae who could actually… unpin these fixed points entirely. They could undo time, fold it back on itself and restart the flow without any of those initial inevitabilities.”

Talia couldn’t help but be a little skeptical. “And you think Stiles has that ability just because of the way he worded his sentence? Ten or seventeen, he’s still a child. I doubt he was really thinking about it that clearly.”

“Ah, but that’s exactly what makes it so telling,” Alan replied, his hands making a concise gesture that she couldn’t quite interpret. Humans just didn’t have quite the same non-verbal vocabulary that werewolves did and trying to decipher what they didn’t say was always a little like putting a string of kanji into Babelfish and hoping for the best. “It’s not a natural turn of phrase for anyone, but especially not a child. He would be far more likely to say that he’d time traveled or gone back into the past. I believe that the part of him that’s fae knows _exactly_ what he did.”

It was a flimsy thing to pin their hopes on, but the stench of Laura’s fear and anguish from hearing the tale still hung heavily in Talia’s nose and she was willing to grasp any hope at all. This was her pack, her _family_.

“I’m not even sure what we _can_ do,” she replied with a sigh of her own. “I’d noticed that Derek was sneaking off to meet someone, but I was ignoring it. It’s the first time he’s shown any interest in anything since…”

Talia trailed off, her frown deepening in unhappiness.

The specter of Derek’s tragic first love was still looming almost a year later. If the boy was to be believed, though, worse things were to come. “If I forbid Derek from seeing the woman without a reason, he’ll just rebel against it. If I give him the reason, he’ll tuck further into his shell and we’ll never get him back out. And if he’s right about Peter…”

Stiles hadn’t been sure about that part. He’d only had suspicions and deductions, but his reasoning had made far too much sense to Talia. Especially in light of Peter’s part in Paige’s death. 

She didn’t want to believe that her brother had been deliberately setting Derek up to be vulnerable to someone like this Kate Argent, but she knew how petty and manipulative Peter could be. She knew how resentful he was that _she’d_ inherited the power and position of the alpha while he was too far down the line to take it without challenging her - something he’d never risk doing openly. Peter only took risks that he knew would work out in his favor and he never stuck his _own_ neck on the line. Not when he could stick someone else’s out.

It was too easy to imagine him bargaining with a hunter to get what he wanted. The only real surprise was that he hadn't been better prepared for the eventuality that the hunter would betray him.

“As Mr. Stilinski was the one to undo the pins of time, it may be down to him to create new ones. I’ll have to consult a few individuals who have a far greater understanding of the fae and their abilities than myself. We’re fortunate that he had the sense to seek help. I shudder to imagine what might have happened if he’d attempted to sort it out all on his own.”

All three gazes settled on the boy curled up on the sofa. Almost as if he sensed that he’d drawn the attention of predators, he hunched in further, making himself as small as possible. 

It seemed impossible that the fate of her entire family might rest on those thin shoulders.


	3. Chapter 3

Sorry guys, this isn't a real chapter. This is a... memo? Public service announcement. Yeah, let's go with that.

My laptop suffered from catastrophic hard drive failure a few weeks ago and my work on the real chapter was lost. I'm also currently without any laptop at all (which is bad because 90% of my writing is done when I'm not at home) and have no idea when I'll be able to afford to replace it.

I also lost my work for my teen wolf big bang and a lot of other things I was working on. It's all very sad and depressing. I got myself some cheap orange flowers to make myself feel better about it. One of my friends has promised to teach me about something called Dropbox? I guess so that I have things saved somewhere that won't suddenly decide to fry itself? I dunno. I've never even heard of Dropbox, so....

For those of you waiting for a real update, I'm afraid you'll have to wait a bit longer. I'm going to try to retrace my steps, but historically, I don't usually have much luck with that sort of thing. Which means starting over from scratch and hoping I don't completely derail my overall plot. We'll see. 

Thank you for your patience.

**Author's Note:**

> -the no-carb diet is real. A friend of mine has epilepsy and she went on it for a while to get control of her seizures. Before the diet, she was having seizures almost monthly. Afterwards, she was seizure free for over two years.


End file.
